Description
The 2021 UK Census revealed a significantly higher-than-average increase in cultural diversity in Manchester compared to national figures, highlighting the city’s evolving multicultural character (ONS, 2023). Amid ongoing calls to decolonise the English music education system (Philpott, 2022), where culture, language and ethnicity are understood to be deeply interwoven, this research project sets out upon a longitudinal study exploring the challenges faced by music teachers who are trying to embrace diverse musical cultures and traditions within their practice.This project is rooted in an ongoing teacher education partnership between the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) and Olympias Music Foundation (Olympias) that sought to support three global majority musicians whom Olympias employed within their organisation to intentionally diversified its musical offering for local children. The project has since evolved into a participatory action research (PAR) model, with RNCM researchers (Gardiner and Bullock) working collaboratively with the three musicians (Einali, Sanga, and Joshi) as both participants and co-researchers. In direct response to initial findings, this shift aims not only to diversify music education, but also to decolonise and transform the research process itself (Kallio, 2020).
This conference paper aims to capture these initial reflections as perceived and voiced by each participant in the group. These perspectives point to the importance of creating open, non-prescriptive musical spaces that allow for the emergence of ‘common ground’ across cultural boundaries. Improvisation and collaborative music making, in particular, has proven to be a valuable medium for enabling cultural expression, fostering communication and cultivating pedagogical sensitivity. Whilst the study carries important implications for both policy and practice, the key focus for this paper is to set out the mandate for more diverse approaches to research itself, unsettling typical research norms in order to better represent the needs, aspirations and perspectives of those othered in English music education.
Kallio, A. A. (2020). Decolonizing music education research and the (im)possibility of methodological responsibility. Research Studies in Music Education, 42(2), 177–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/1321103X19845690
Office for National Statistics (2023) How life has changed in Manchester: Census 2021. [Online] https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/censusareachanges/E08000003/
Philpott, C. (2022) What does it mean to decolonise the school music curriculum?. London Review of Education, 20 (1), 7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.20.1.07
| Period | 31 Jul 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | ISME world conference 2026 - Montreal |
| Event type | Conference |